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Tired of watching life from the sidelines, Baylee Kunkel wonders who she would be if she weren’t wearing the body of a fat girl. Although Baylee projects a confident version of herself, she is wildly insecure, judging herself and holding on to negative feelings about her body image. When it comes to the way she looks and the way she presents herself to the world, Baylee lives by a strict fashion code: She does not tuck her shirt into her pants and she does not knowingly accessorize with something that will accentuate her adipose tissue. Yearning to be seen, to be wanted, and to beRead More →

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Basketball defines Barclay Elliot. As captain of the Chitwood High School basketball team in Georgia, Barclay dreams of eventually putting his talent to the test at a big-city D1 school with his best friend Zack Ito. The protagonist in Time Out by Sean Hayes, Todd Milliner, and Carlyn Greenwald, Barclay believes that a team is a family who shares everything and supports one another; it is a place where talent, strength, and fortitude mix to hold one another up, no matter the burden. However, when his biggest fan and the father figure in his life, his grandpa Scratch dies before seeing the Wildcats win anotherRead More →

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Dedicated to all readers who “stagger beneath the weight of expectations and emotions, The Third Daughter by Adrienne Tooley tells two parallel stories. One reveals the ambitions of the Warnou family; the other shares the reality of the Anders family. As much as this is a story about those who are born into wealth versus those who are not, it is also about the impact of power and privilege. It reveals the consequences of knowing and embracing one’s identity. Born the eldest in the royal family, Princess Elodie Warnou has been raised to be strong, calculating, and regal. Her mother taught her not only toRead More →

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For seventeen-year-old Lola Espinoza, the main character in Ella Cerón’s first novel ¡Viva Lola Espinoza!, life is predictable and planned: sacrifice a social life and focus on earning good grades in order to get into a good college. Those expectations leave Lola feeling like she’s in “an academic purgatory with no salvation in sight. . . . There is no time for mall hangs or homecoming dances or parties or, God forbid, a relationship” (6). Although the quiet, deliberate, and introverted Lola likes being smart, she also feels like there has to be more to life than what her parents want for her; she daresRead More →

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Just in time for summer, Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute will serve as a great beach book. Although Talia Hibbert’s debut young adult novel is light reading, it does occasionally rise above the cotton-candy fluff of a romance novel with its insight about human nature. Hibbert’s protagonists are a pair of seventeen-year-olds in their final year at Rosewood Academy in England. For any readers requiring introduction to this discourse community, Hibbert provides a glossary. As the story unfolds, Celine Bagura is an excessively sarcastic conspiracy theorist with the goal of attending Cambridge to earn a law degree. Focused, serious, and prone to being pedantic, sheRead More →

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Fierce, determined, proud, and furious, Leto wants to be remembered as extraordinary. Instead, at seventeen years old, she becomes one of the twelve girls sacrificed to appease the raging sea and to abate Poseidon’s wrath so that others in Ithaca can prosper. Only, Leto doesn’t die. She washes up on the shores of the island Pandou where Melantho introduces her to a mission: In order to break the curse and to save other girls from the annual hanging ritual, the Prince of Ithaca—who gives the orders for the deaths—must die. However, once Leto and Melantho reach the shores of Itaca under a ruse, they discoverRead More →

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A talented seamstress and crafter, Sonia Patil loves creating and consuming cosplay and the comics that inspire it. She also has a crush on James Cooper. While faint and staggering from a medical condition, James stumbles into a western New York canal. Dressed in a super-hero inspired costume she has sewn herself, Sonia jumps in and drags James to safety, then runs before the cops arrive because she fears drawing attention to her family who are undocumented immigrants from India. Although Sonia is a U.S. citizen, her mother has already been deported, and her sister Kareena needs the state provided healthcare to treat her currentlyRead More →

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An Earl’s daughter, Lady Ela Dalvi doesn’t fall from grace; she is shoved by her former best friend, Poppy Landers who concocts a tale that sullies Ela’s reputation. Vowing to get revenge, Ela invents a new personality and becomes Miss Lyra Whitley, an enigmatic heiress who plans to infiltrate the glittering ballrooms of London, 1817. After all, “money has a way of opening the tightest, most elite circles” (10), and the recipe for high society female accomplishment in the United Kingdom during the late Regency era and later were fortune, connections, beauty, and virtue. On this defiant journey across class boundaries, Lyra’s disguise seeks position,Read More →

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Although the two main characters in Deborah Crossland’s newest novel, The Quiet Part Out Loud are a baseball pitcher and a cheerleader, this is not your typical “athlete gets the girl” romance. This is a book about mental, emotional, and spiritual wholeness as much as it is about how relationships involve opening worlds for one another and experiencing those worlds together. It confirms that love is an action verb. More than just feeling, love is doing; it is serving the needs of others. Set in San Francisco, the story follows the lives of Alfie Thanasis and Mia Clementine. Determined to find beauty in people andRead More →